Things We Lost in the Fire
by Kanthia
Summary: Love is hard and everything has changed. (Set in between Books 1 and 2; Makkora and a little Korrasami)


**notes: **things get sexy, Korra deals with gender dysphoria, all that jazz. set in between books 1 and 2, for obvious reasons.

please enjoy!

* * *

**things we lost in the fire**

Korra has lived a thousand times if she has lived once, and this is not something to be taken lightly. She has died in so many different ways, old age and poison and heartbreak, bled out on countless battlefields, and at least once in childbirth; on difficult nights she relives her deaths in nightmares, suffocates, drowns, dies betrayed.

To her, then, love has every right to come as a burden, a thousand lives and loves all pressed together. Who could love the Avatar more than the Avatar has already been loved? Who could hope to compete with the thousands of lovers who had come before them, who have written their affection onto the body of the endlessly reborn? Kyoshi kept a harem, in her time; Kuruk waged an war against an immortal spirit for his bride-to-be, whom he loved more than his own life, or even the world; and there was a little-known Avatar born as a prince to the earthbenders in a time of peace, who dedicated his life to learning all the whims and ways of carnal delights, fucked his way to enlightenment, as though balance could be achieved through pleasure.

Mako throws off his shirt, and for a moment she's taken back to the last time she had sex - as Aang, stealing a moment with Katara near sunrise, love against death. It's not easy finding peace in a new body. She trusts Mako, though, and she loves him, so she tells him her small fears as he puts his hands on her.

"It doesn't feel wrong," she says, his lips leaving bruises on her collarbone. "It just feels - do that again - different. I think I was once someone who didn't need to have sex, didn't get turned on by people. It's - oh, Mako -"

Mako doesn't pretend to understand what she's going through. He's just a kid from the slums, damn it, and he loves Korra - but he doesn't love Aang, or Roku, or Kyoshi, or Kuruk or Yangchen, quite in the same way. At the very least, once she gets over her moment of lucidity about what genitals she has this time around, she's very inventive. Keeps him guessing, and through guessing, keeps him laughing, and through laughing, keeps him in love.

(And then there is Asami, soft kisses in dark places. Reminds Korra of an Avatar who desired the company of women, exclusively. They never had children.)

* * *

In a past life, Korra is certain, she was born to the Northern Water Tribes; and while healing remained even then woman's work and war, man's work, inclination determined gender and not the other way around. She was born a daughter and raised a son, a tall, serious Avatar who dedicated himself to intervention through mediation. Such a practice seemed to have been forgotten during the Hundred Year War. Much was forgotten in the years between the arc of Sozin's Comet through the sky.

She finds herself musing on this as she hears a man preaching in Republic City Park about the evils of same-sex coupling, and the need for strong breeding for the future of the world against the devastation of the Fire Nation campaigns. She's not sure if she's disgusted or amused; are people really so short-sighted as to throw away love and the right to their bodies for the sake of a murky and uncertain future?

Asami's unconvinced. "Maybe it's because I'm only alive now," she says, over dinner, "But a lot of history textbooks argue that the success of the Fire Nation, waging war for a full hundred years, was due to that kind of stuff." She frowns. "My dad talked a lot about strong breeding. He calls it 'eugenics'."

There's a lot of history written into Korra. In that moment, she wonders if part of her job is stopping these kinds of ideas from spreading. Tenzin once told her about Aang's campaigns across the Fire Nation, re-educating children who had been taught that his brothers' and sisters' genocide was a military conflict between the Fire Nation spreading civilization and the Air Nomads stuck in the brutal past. She may as well be the only one who knows that time moves forward but not necessarily upward. The thought is terrifying.

* * *

Someone wrote love poetry and dedicated it to the Avatar. It was written while Aang was alive, but when Korra finds it in the Republic City library - on display, no less, a metaphor for their gratitude - she can't help but feel as though her privacy has been invaded, loved by someone she doesn't even know. The author is dead. It's a war in her, death and life, young body and old spirit. The world is moving on and Korra is old, so old.

Some days Korra finds him and yet her mind is a hundred thousand miles away, busy taming the stars in the sky, and bringing her down to earth takes more strength than Mako has in him. He doesn't mind the sex, and neither does she, but two months in and there are fissures already.

(He wonders, sometimes, how Katara did it. Are some people more capable of love than others? Is he asking too much of himself? And what exactly does Katara see when she looks at Korra?)

"It's not fair," she says, in his arms, one night. "Everyone expects so much from me, but I'm only one person."

Mako wants to say, she is much more than that, and loving Korra is like loving the whole world at once. There's too much of her, and not enough harmony, for him to handle. But instead he holds her closer, because she needs him, and so the world needs him, and it's a small favour he can do for the future.

He fell in love with a headstrong woman, by being thrown into a situation out of their control. Surviving things brought them together; having survived, and returning to the drudgery of daily life, they find that love is hard and everything has changed.

* * *

_did you hear the Avatar's heart stop beating?_  
_in ba sing se, on account of a lightning strike._  
_strange that a single life is so fleeting,  
and a thousand thousand lives so unalike._


End file.
